Krypteiai spartane

As E. Lévy pointed out in 1988, the ancient sources convey two different images of the Crypteia. According to Plato (Laws I 633b-c) and the scholiast ad loc., the Crypteia was a hard endurance test. Plato and the scholia do not mention the helot hunt, the most eminent feature of Plutarch's account of the Crypteia (Lyc. 28), largely based on ‘Aristotle’ Lakedaimonion Politeia (cf. Heracl. fr. 10 Dilts = fr. 611,10 Rose). Plutarch's debt from ‘Aristotle’ is larger than usually assumed and includes the reference to the treacherous massacre of helots narrated by Thucydides (IV 80,3-4). That the Crypteia operated in this action was a (fallacious) hypothesis of ‘Aristotle’, which induced him to suggest that sometimes the victims were dangerous helots designated by the authorities. His reconstruction provided in turn ground for the (no less fallacious) modern view of the Crypteia as a secret police. The paper summarizes the modern attitudes towards the Crypteia, and the difficult dealing of 19th century historians with Plutarch's description. The 20th century scholarship had many good reasons for holding true this evidence and has usually conceived the endurance test and the killing of helots as two faces of a century-old institution, which came to combine initiation and police duties or terroristic aims. This view does not stand up to closer scrutiny. Plato and the sources of the scholia illustrate an elder form of the Crypteia, while ‘Aristotle’ portrays a modified Crypteia, set up in the mid-fourth century, as a counterpart to the annual declaration of war against the helots (Plut. Lyc. 28,7). The Spartans refused to recognize the legitime possession of Messenia by the Messenians: the Messenians were not true Messenians, but only helots. The annual declaration of war against the helots expressed the stubborn will to recover Messenia. The killing of some helots in Laconia by the young Crypteian was a vicarious way to conduct an impossible campaign, and above all to hand over this supreme duty to the next generations.